Scry, pt 1.

Stumbled into the apartment with a box full of parts. Heard strains of a canine symphony as the back end of jeans closed the door.

Spread the parts out on the floor. Get the screwdriver and dismantle a size three haul of parts alternatively archaic and gleaming, factory fresh. Check the archaic against the book, assure genuine status. That one, there. Paid five dollars to a dealer that didn't look like he knew what he was doing. The device, supposedly early 90s external modem, cracked open. Hollow except for a small card of circuitry. Rage flares, subsides. Check everything against the book. Huge tome of components material and somatic. Methods to the madness of industrial technobabble. The card is listed. Still early 90s. Game cartridge. Excellent.

Stow the rest, fish out transistors and a single chip from their stasis in an icicle box in the deep freezer. Chip chosen for form this time. Eight vestigial strips of metal oriented down on either side, at once insectoid and polygonal. Old. older than its owner and worth more on the market. New age spider stolen to bless this crawl over optic webbing.

Transistors and spider-chip in the ashtray. Sharp smell of burning plastic filling the hermetically sealed room. Single terminal composed of netbook, two monitors, jiggered power supplies. No record to spin. Discs themselves impossible to buy, let alone turntable parts. Substitution is half the damage. Cleverness the other. Replace two parts freestyle jockeying with one part thumb-drive playlist over tinny speakers. Sound is important. The straining synthetic of song one, titled in some ironic stone-age hackerspeak.

Some things are timeless. Delicate flat disk of glass, delicate etchings spiderwebbing the surface. Open tray. Spin the disk. Take a deep breath. Close eyes. Say the words.

"Hello, world."